Image Credit: Edwin Remsberg
A research team led by Erik Lichtenberg from the University of Maryland’s Department of Agricultural & Resource Economics has been awarded a $3.6 million grant from the National Science Foundation's Growing Convergence Research program to develop a new scientific framework for understanding and valuing ecosystem services at scale, with an initial focus on pollinator conservation.
Putting a value on ecosystem services can be helpful for policymakers and conservationists trying to understand where conservation dollars would do the most good. The team will use pollination to develop a new scientific framework for doing that.
“We know that wild bees and other insects are really important for pollinating so many of the fruits and vegetables we eat. But it’s been really hard to document just how valuable they are,” Lichtenberg said. “Pollination ecology studies provide great evidence but they take so much time and labor that the evidence they give us is at scales that are too small and geographically limited to generalize from. Larger-scale studies use generalizations that don’t give us accurate estimates. Our study combines AI, theory and methods from ecology, and cutting-edge methods in economics to bridge the gap between the two. And the methods the project will create have a lot of potential for documenting the value of other ecosystem services."
The first step for the researchers will be to develop AI and remote-sensing tools capable of detecting small objects such as individual bee boxes and flower density across large landscapes. The tools will generate datasets far more extensive than traditional surveys allow.
Next, they will validate these AI-derived observations with on-the-ground ecological fieldwork, verifying that what the models detect from above matches what is happening in the landscape and revising their algorithms as needed. Then they will combine data from remote sensing, surveys, and government data for analysis using modern econometric methods, grounded in ecological and economic theory, to statistically link habitat conditions, managed pollinator populations (like commercial honeybee stocking), land use decisions, and crop yields.
The end results will be fed into economic models that can assign a monetary value on “nonmarket” goods, like pollination, services that benefit farmers and society but don't have a direct price tag. The team expects to identify specific land use practices that most benefit pollinators, and to quantify the economic value those practices generate.
While centered on pollinators, the resulting framework is designed to be scalable to other ecosystem services, offering a new transdisciplinary methodology for guiding conservation and land management decisions more broadly.
The five-year project, beginning September 1, brings together expertise from five different disciplines and institutions. The team includes collaborators Kathy Baylis from UC Santa Barbara’s Geography Department, Rufus Isaacs from Michigan State’s Entomology Department, and Elinor Lichtenberg and Xiaohui Yuan from the University of North Texas’s Biology and Computer Science and Engineering Departments.
